Nearly three billion at the box office, nine Oscar nominations, and more sequels than you can shake a stick at, but does anybody really like Avatar? Sam Brooks bloody does.
Thirteen years ago a film came out that was meant to change the game. It was meant to usher in a new era in cinema where what was put on screen was limited only to a filmmaker’s imagination and budget. It was meant to be remembered. Sadly, I’m not talking about Julie and Julia, which saw Meryl Streep ham it up as the spy-turned-French-cooking-expert Julia Child. I’m talking about Avatar.
In the years since, Avatar has become better known as a meme than a movie. You probably know that it has basically the same plot as Fern Gully, and that the Na’vi bang by putting their braids together. You might not be able to recall a single plot detail, even though you saw it more than once (no judgment, I saw it three times). Hell, based on early reviews of Avatar: The Way of Water, it seems likely that the first Avatar is destined to be remembered as the lesser precursor to its sequel.
But I’m here to tell you that Avatar is more than just a meme. It’s not even a bad film. In fact, it’s actually very good!
Firstly we need to acknowledge the fact that James Cameron has never made a bad film. Not only that, he has made the two best sequels of all time – Aliens and Terminator 2. Titanic is, as far as I’m concerned, as close to a perfect film as you can get. True Lies, Terminator, even The Abyss – all good films.
Secondly, people forget that Avatar wasn’t just a massive commercial hit when it first came out, it was genuinely critically beloved too. It was a contender to win both the Oscar for Best Picture and Best Director! The Oscars shouldn’t necessarily be viewed as an arbiter of what is and isn’t good, but they’re not a bad indicator of what has been historically well regarded. And it was actually something of a surprise when both The Hurt Locker and Kathryn Bigelow – the first woman to win Best Director – came away with those awards instead.
If you’ve forgotten the plot of Avatar, which is fair enough, it’s basically a pro-environment, anti-colonialist sci-fi film about what happens when humans threaten an indigenous species on another planet. In brief: they fuck around and find out. Also, at some point, our human protagonist, the excessively 1D Jake Sully, becomes one of the indigenous species and falls in love with Neytiri, another one. It’s not worth thinking about too hard. Nothing in Avatar is worth thinking about too hard.
The point of Avatar is not the plot, it’s the experience – that rare feeling like you’re existing in somebody else’s imagination for two hours and 42 minutes (and that person was given the money to back it up). It’s telling that the best moments of Avatar – and there’s a lot across those nearly three hours – are when James Cameron ignores the plot and indulges us in Pandora, the blue-green paradise that he created. Derivative? Sure, but just as originality never made a good film, derivativeness never guaranteed a bad one.
At the time, people said Avatar reminded them of a video game – and they meant it as a pejorative. Avatar reminds me of a video game, but in the best way possible. A video game needs to have iron-clad worldbuilding, a coherent style and it needs to engage the audience in a way that leads them through the action and presents as few barriers as possible to engage with it. Video games, at their best, allow you to escape into another world and frolic around in them for a while. Avatar is the closest I’ve come to experiencing that in a film.
It feels silly to defend a film that everybody saw and nobody remembers. You’re not supposed to remember the plot of Avatar – which is, frankly, perfunctory and intentionally ridden with tropes so it doesn’t challenge us too much. You’re supposed to remember the feeling of watching it.
It’s not James Cameron’s fault that nobody else has done what Avatar did and create a fully immersive 3D experience with CGI that feels like the perfect marriage between live action and animation. But I’ll be damned if I’ve experienced a moment like when Jake manages to actually, properly, ride Toruk for the first time in the 13 years since Avatar. And I probably won’t until I settle in to watch the sequel at a 10am screening on the biggest screen available.